After 60 years in track, Don Schlesinger has another young jump star and no plans to quit

WEST NYACK — Don Schlesinger stood by the long jump pit at Clarkstown South High School Thursday morning with everything he needed.

There was his heavy-duty rake, his tape measure and 10-year-old Sunny Prinz, his most recent pupil.

If you live in Rockland County and know anything about track and field and the art of jumping horizontally, chances are you know at least a little about Schlesinger, whose initial step into a 60-year love affair with track and field was an unsure one.

Schlesinger, 77, went through Bronx Science, graduating in 1963 without playing a sport.

But that didn't stop Schlesinger, who studied mathematics at City College of New York, from being recruited to the college track team as a freshman from a physical education class, the track coach offering the encouraging assessment, “You look pretty fast.”

With that verbal pat on the back, an unplanned four-year college sprinting career was launched.

That ability to seize unexpected opportunities has marked Schlesinger's a renaissance man of sorts.

His resume includes 16 years of teaching math in northern Manhattan at Inwood Junior High 52 (his alma mater). His math skills led to him being recruited into finance, where he spent more than 13 years, the bulk with Morgan Stanley as a proprietary trader of options before he became an international lecturer and seminar leader on derivatives. But Schlesinger is also a fine writer and quite the blackjack player. He combined the two, authoring books on blackjack, and he's so revered as an expert on the game that he’s in the Blackjack Hall of Fame in California.

Locally, Schlesinger’s most recognized for his nearly 25 years as a high school track coach – all but a couple of years completely volunteer.

Sun rises on a new talent

He discovered Sunny two months ago at the 33rd running of the Clarkstown Annual Track Meet, which Schlesinger founded and continues to run for 7-through-12-year-old residents of the town.

The event started with 40 kids, has had as many as 114 and averages 60-plus. It has been a “launching pad,” as Schlesinger notes, for many successful Clarkstown North and Clarkstown South high school track athletes, some of whom have gone on to compete in college track.

Three jump pits were in use during the most recent town meet but Schlesinger’s eagle coaching eye was able to zero in on Sunny, who’d done gymnastics for three years but, prior to the meet, had never tried track.

Tall for her age at 5'0.5" – good for track, not so much going forward for gymnastics - Sunny won the girls 9-10 long jump at 12 feet and also won her division’s 400-meter run.

Now, seemingly in a nanosecond under Schlesinger's tutelage, she’s significantly better at jumping and just days from traveling to famed Hayward Field at the University of Oregon to compete in long jump at the U.S. Track & Field National Junior Olympic Championships.

Having qualified by winning the regional JO earlier this month at 13 feet, 4.75 inches, Sunny is seeded third out of 58 girls in the 9-10 age bracket.

Schlesinger, who noted Sunny’s best distance is only a couple of inches shy of that of the top seed, is quick to point out anything can happen on any day, so he’ll make no prediction, instead settling on saying he’ll be happy if she finishes top-eight to secure a medal.

“My big motto is ‘we never celebrate early,’“ he said.

'It's all twists of fate'

Sunny’s mom, Dana, a former Clarkstown North High hurdler and long jumper, will accompany her to Oregon.

Marveling at how her daughter has come to be a track athlete coached by Schlesinger, Dana, who was Dana Ceci when competing for North before graduating in 1997, said, “It’s all twists of fate.”

“There’s a certain destiny to the whole thing – a right-place-at-the-right-time type of thing,” Schlesinger commented.

Dana, whose other children (boys, 8 and 12) are focused on baseball, competed herself in the annual town track meet when she was a kid.

She noted she took Sunny to it for multiple reasons: She remembered it being fun, she figured Sunny had natural ability and track had had a major positive role in her growing up.

In some ways, it's the what's-not-to-like? sport.

“Everyone cheers for each other. That's very rare in a sport. When you’re feeling you can’t push yourself farther or harder, you hear the crowd cheering and the coaches yelling. It’s a great feeling that everyone has your back," she said.

But whether Sunny, who’ll start fifth grade this fall at Laurel Plains Elementary School in New City, would take to it, her mother didn’t know and neither did Sunny.

“That morning I was just doing it for fun. I never thought I’d be doing track,” said Sunny, who noted she's now all in.

Despite her daughter's clear athleticism, Dana, who didn’t pursue track after high school, had no idea Sunny would leave the Clarkstown South campus as a double champion.

She also had zero expectation of running into Schlesinger. Her parents, who also attended the town meet, spotted and recognized him as the dad of Clarkstown South jumping star Jodi Schlesinger (South Class of 1999).

Dana, who has since learned from Schlesinger that she still holds Clarkstown North’s girls indoor 55-meter hurdles record, doesn’t recall how far she long-jumped in high school but knows it wasn’t anything near the distance registered by Schlesinger’s daughter, who was already the Rockland County outdoor champion in both long and triple jump as an eighth grader.

Jodi got her start in track with her father coaching her in running, at age 7.

When she started long jumping two years later, her dad started learning about that event to be able to coach her. Jodi ended up qualifying in long jump for three national Junior Olympic championships.

She was also the reason he became an expert in the triple jump.

As Schlesinger explains, as a sixth grader, Jodi told him, she wanted to win the Pearl River Twilight Meet Series' girls championship trophy. Events alternated weekly, including the long jump with the triple jump. So the best shot she had at the trophy was for her dad to learn about the triple jump and teach her.

Consider Schlesinger and his daughter A-plus students.

Jodi won the series title and by the time she was a seventh grader, she was a Clarkstown South High varsity long jumper and triple jumper.

Viking coaches and Schlesinger's continued coaching helped her become a five-time Rockland County champ in the outdoor triple jump, four-time county outdoor long jump champ, three-time national high school triple jump champion and seven-time state high school triple jump champion. Her high school outdoor personal best and, at the time, state all-time No. 2 triple jump mark of 41-10.75 currently sits, all these years later, No. 7 among New York high school girls.

Unbound by gravity, or paychecks

It was after Jodi, who also won two national Junior Olympic triple jump crowns, graduated from South and was at Duke on an athletic scholarship that her dad decided he should “pay this forward and pay back a little bit from all of the good track has given to me and especially to Jodi,” and start volunteer coaching at area high schools.

He has coached jumpers from every high school in Rockland and 2012-2019 served as Clarkstown North's jumps coach.

Schlesinger, who recently helped coach jumpers at St. Thomas Aquinas College in Rockland, was recruited by coaches Paul and Matt Joyce (brothers who once competed for Clarkstown South) to coach at Immaculate Heart Academy in Bergen County, New Jersey. He did so to a small extent while also coaching full-time at Clarkstown North during the spring of 2019. Then he scrapped his plan to retire from coaching and started volunteering at IHA full-time with jumpers the following winter.

Read more: Iona Prep's Jan Mitchell, Cornwall's Dave Feuer get top state track spring coaching honors

The IHA track schedule conflicts to a large extent with Section 1’s, but when it doesn’t Schlesinger can often be found back at a local long jump pit, coaching Clarkstown North kids.

“He’s definitely a legend and a gift to the sport in this county,” Dana Prinz said. … “He has dedicated so much of his free time to helping so many people. He’s become family in such a short time. He’s an incredible human being."

Her daughter says of Schlesinger, “He’s amazing.”

While Clarkstown North paid him for a couple of years after an official coaching position opened up, Schlesinger has never sought compensation.

His philosophy has been, “You can pay me by jumping better.”

“Every time someone qualifies (for something), wins a championship or has a personal best, that’s my pay,” said Schlesinger, who has coached both state and national champs besides his daughter.

“To have any input at all in making some of those kids a little better, so that's what gives back to me and what keeps me going,” Schlesinger said.

And he has no plans to stop.

Schlesinger, who fondly recalls his own daughter going down the hallway of the family’s now-43-year-old home in Bardonia, with a hop, skip and jump while learning triple jumping, is already thinking how Sunny’s jumping events should expand in a couple of years.

“Thirteen years old, maybe 12,” he said, “we’ll fool around with the triple jump.”

Nancy Haggerty covers cross-country, track & field, field hockey, skiing, ice hockey, basketball, girls lacrosse and other sporting events for The Journal News/lohud. Follow her on Twitter at @HaggertyNancy.

This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Don Schlesinger, 60 years in track, finds new reason to coach in 10-year-old prodigy